Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. But do you?Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. You could use a text-mode browser like w3m in the terminal instead of using a graphical browser. You could disable Flash entirely and never watch videos online. You have the ability to control what it does-you could even disable all images entirely and browse the web in text format, if you want. The same is true for JavaScript-leaving it enabled is a very small risk for a very big benefit. The small risk of using a web browser instead of a text editor is worth the huge improvement in usability a browser offers. To protect against such attacks, we could stop using browsers entirely, downloading web page HTML files and reading them by hand in a text editor. Meanwhile, there have been other cases where browsers themselves were exploited and disabling JavaScript didn’t help. There have certainly been a few cases where disabling JavaScript could have blocked a new security vulnerability from being exploited, but those have been rare and fixed quickly. But if your computer is so old that it can't handle modern websites, it may be time to upgrade it-as the web improves, it needs more resources to do what it does, just like any other program on your computer. If you run something super basic, it'll take up fewer resources. Lastly, disabling JavaScript will take up less CPU and RAM on your computer, which is to be expected. We don’t encourage blocking ads, but if you must, there are better ways to do so than disabling JavaScript altogether. Most websites use JavaScript-it’s what makes the web we have today possible.ĭisabling JavaScript also prevents some types of ads from loading. However, this is extremely uncommon and the rare security holes in JavaScript engines have been patched very quickly. There have been a few browser vulnerabilities that were exploited via JavaScript. Many of these people do so because of a perceived security benefit. There is a small but vocal subset of users that disable JavaScript. Why Do People Want to Disable JavaScript? JavaScript isn't the big security threat that Java was. It’s not an insecure plug-in produced by a single company, like Java is. JavaScript is built into your web browser-Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera all have their own JavaScript engines. JavaScript and Java aren’t really related at all, aside from the name (which was chosen for marketing reasons). Note that JavaScript isn’t the same thing as Java. Most websites use JavaScript to provide various features. It’s the language that powers modern web apps, allowing web pages to dynamically load and send content in the background without page loads and do other dynamic, interactive things. However, JavaScript has become much more than that. JavaScript was initially pretty basic, and was used for things like alert boxes and menus that appeared when you hovered your mouse over elements on the page. JavaScript is a programming language commonly used on web pages (among other things). So before we talk about NoScript, we should actually talk about JavaScript: the programming language that makes the web we have today possible. NoScript is, essentially, a Firefox add-on that disables things like JavaScript from running on web sites you visit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |